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Category Archives: Technology

I remember one of my sons , when he was a toddler, asking when the world turned color. I had to laugh at the innocent question, for he thought that prior to color movies and TV, the world had been black and white.

To answer his question, well at least from a TV perspective, it was in September 1941, 2 years into WWII.

The Scottish engineer, innovator,and one of the inventors of the mechanical television,John Logie Baird, had been working to produce a two-color image.

He did this by by placing filters in front of two tubes and then project them onto a smaller screen to enhance the effective intensity.The subject he used to demonstrate his invention had had a very colorful life herself.

Paddy Naismith had been a race driver,chauffeur to Prime Minister Mr Ramsay Macdonald, air hostess and actress. In September 1941 John Logie Baird used a live image of Paddy Naismith used to demonstrate the first all-electronic color television system, The picture had 600 lines of resolution, and used a monochromatic cathode-ray tube with a rotating transparent color wheel in front of it.

It wasn’t until 1951 when the first color TV were sold, and initially they were taken of the market again a month after the sales. It was only until the 60s when first tv shows were broadcast in color.

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Don’t worry I am not going to go into details what a computer bug is and what to do how to resolve it. Nor will I explain what the implications of a computer bug are.

That would be a long and tedious blog. In fact this blog will be short and sweet, it will be about the first ever bug being found.

on September 9, 1947, U.S. Navy officer Grace Hopper found a moth between the relays on the Harvard Mark II computer she was working on. In those days computers filled (large) rooms and the warmth of the internal components attracted moths, flies and other flying creatures. Those creatures then shortened circuits and caused the computer to malfunction. She taped it to the operations logbook with the annotation “First actual case of bug being found”. I

So the first computer bug was just that, a bug.

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Computers nowadays come in all shapes and sizes from a smartphone to the super computer Mira.

An essential requirement nowadays is that computers are portable. It may be hard to believe but the history of portable computers goes back 37 years, even when I write it ’37 years’ I can’t believe it . i was barely a teenager then.

The Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable microcomputer, released on April 3, 1981, by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighed 10.7 kg (24.5 lb), cost US$1,795, and ran the CP/M 2.2 operating system. Powered directly from a mains socket as it had no on-board battery, it was still classed as a portable device since it could be hand-carried when packed.

While the Osborne 1 was a good deal at $1,795, it also came bundled with about $1,500 of free software:

CP/M Utility

CP/M Operating System

SuperCalc spreadsheet application

WordStar word processing application with MailMerge

Microsoft MBASIC programming language (interpreted)

Digital Research CBASIC programming language (compiled)

Lets just have a look at the dazzling specification of this marvel of high tech equipment.

5-inch, 52 character × 24 line monochrome CRT display, mapped as a window on 128 × 32 character display memory

Parallel printer port configurable as an IEEE-488 port

RS-232 compatible 1200 or 300 baud Serial port for use with external modems or serial printers.

And yes this complicated piece of machinery needed a 500+ pages instruction manual.

The Osborne 1 was powered by a wall plug with a switched-mode power supply, and had no internal battery. An aftermarket battery pack offering 1-hour run-time was available, and connected to the system through a front panel socket. Early models (tan case) were wired for 120 V or 240 V only. Later models (blue case, shipping after May 1982) could be switched by the user to run on either 120 V or 230 V, 50 or 60 Hz. There was no internal fan; a hatch at the top of the (blue) case could be opened for ventilation.

Ah those were the days.

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The Apple Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It was one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Development of the Lisa began in 1978, and it underwent many changes during the development period before shipping at the very high price of US$9,995 with a 5 MB hard drive. The high price, relatively low performance and unreliable “Twiggy” floppy disks led to poor sales, with only 100,000 units sold.
Officially, “Lisa” stood for “Local Integrated Software Architecture”, but it was also the name of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ daughter.

The Lisa is the first commercial computer with a GUI, or Graphical User Interface. Prior to the Lisa, all computers were text based – you typed commands on the keyboard to make the system respond. Now, with the Lisa, you just point-and-click at tiny pictures on the screen with a small rolling device called a ‘mouse’.

Apple Lisa

Introduced:

January 1983

Released:

June 1983

Price:

US $9,995

How many?

100,000 in two years

CPU:

Motorola 68000, 5 MHz

RAM:

1 Meg

Display:

12″ monochrome monitor

720 X 364 graphics

Ports:

1 parallel, 2 serial ports

mouse port

Expansion:

three internal slots

Storage:

Two 5-1/4 inch floppy drives

external 5 Meg hard drive

OS:

Apple Lisa GUI

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I am passionate about my site and I know a you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2 ,however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thanks
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the paypal link. Many thanks